Vietnam and My Daughter's Private War

By Edward Schumacher; Edward Schumacher, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is writing a book about his Amerasian daughter and Vietnam.

Published: August 15, 1988

This morning, my daughter had an attack of hysteria. She tossed in a trance in bed for more than an hour, gasping for breath in minor spasms, caught in a nightmare she couldn't escape. In horror and despair, my wife and I tried to hold and caress her.

Thuy Duong, my daughter, is Amerasian - I recently went to Vietnam to get her - and psychologists say her attack is common among children like her. Normally a spunky 16-year-old, she's adapting amazingly rapidly - studying English avidly, singing in the church choir, washing dishes at home. But inside, Thuy Duong still aches, guilty for leaving the rest of her family behind, unsure of her place in her new family, insecure about her future in a very different world.

And as my wife and I clutch her we wonder why: Why still such pain from the war? Why did it take so many years to get her out, thus denying her the easier adjustment as a child? Why is the rest of her Vietnamese family still stuck behind?

The war has not gone away for millions of others, Vietnamese and Americans. What are we doing wrong?

I first went to Vietnam in 1970 as a young lieutenant assigned to a province advisory team in Nha Trang, on the central coast. I went out daily into the villages and fields to help build things like schools, irrigation dams and fishing boats in order to win over, in that fateful phrase, the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. Still, it was fulfilling work. But as the months passed, and the grand unfolding tragedy of the war became clearer, the work became like one of those powerful Asian opiates: too addictive to give up.

Early in the year, I also met a woman. Tran Thi Minh Canh, the deputy manager of the local Army post exchange, became, in many ways, my eyes into the Vietnamese enigma. When the Army tried to send me home early, I extended, but when the time came again, I reluctantly knew that this wasn't my culture or war. But I couldn't stop choking as I boarded the plane to leave.

It would be a year later before I would learn about my daughter, Thuy Duong, and two years after that before I would return to Vietnam on a Christmas visit. Minh Canh, who had been separated from her husband when I knew her, was reunited with him. I left happily confident that I would share in Thuy Duong. Four months later, however, with brutal suddenness, South Vietnam fell.

It took 13 years of letters, court documents and pleading to almost anyone who would listen before I would get back to see her. In the interim, Thuy Duong was almost tossed into sea by escaping South Vietnamese soldiers. She collected buffalo chips to sell as firewood. She was turned away from some government schools and, on more than one occasion in the streets, taunted for being a ''My Li,'' or Vietnamese American.

Then, three years ago, her mother was arrested and sent to a prison work camp in the mountains on charges of trafficking in American remains and being a C.I.A. agent, the latter based largely on Thuy Duong being half American. After the intervention of the Spanish and Vietnamese Red Crosses, Minh Canh was finally freed and Thuy Duong given an exit visa just before my arrival.

Rolling peacefully in a pedicab on a balmy, moonlit evening down the streets of Saigon, now renamed Ho Chi Minh City, past old American barracks that are now apartment buildings, past the American Embassy, which is now an oil research institute, I wondered what the war had been all about.

Some 58,000 American deaths and more than a million Vietnamese ones, and for what? We had lost, but how were American interests in the world really all the worst for it? Where, even, are the dominoes? I came in via Bangkok, an incredibly thriving city. Outside of Indochina, the rest of Southeast Asia is the same.

The only major loss was to the freedom of the people of Indochina, and that was never a major policy concern.

Now, inside Vietnam, I saw the remnants of war everywhere. The economy, wracked as well by failed revolutionary ardor, was in ruins. Rice was short, and, while no one died of starvation, I couldn't stop on the sidewalk for more than 30 seconds without a beggar sticking out a hand. Disabled vets writhed like serpents in the mud outside the Saigon central market as they held up cups for alms.

Amerasian children hung around outside the hotels. One tall, lanky teen-ager showed me a picture of a young sergeant holding the boy as a baby. ''My father was at Pleiku,'' he said, his haunting eyes searching mine to see if I knew him. One particularly lovely 17-year-old girl sold peanuts by day. One night I saw her in a pretty cotton print dress in a bar with a toupeed German.

In shops and on the streets, Vietnamese desperate to leave would surreptiously offer information on the remains of the nearly 1,800 Americans still listed as missing in action. One even claimed to know of a living American, a United States Senator's son, being hidden by sympathetic villagers in the mountains. They all asked that I forward the information to American officials in the belief that they would be rewarded with a visa. It was all so sadly futile: There is no reward program.